Love maps and shadow play
Bronwyn Platten’s ‘Love Maps and Shadow Play’ was the second in her ongoing series of exhibitions treating and researching conceptions of love, erotica, the erotic and desire. Where the previous exhibition had looked at Asian, European and American sex-museums’ conceptions of the erotic and sexual (‘The Museum of Love & Romance’, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, 2001), this exhibition dealt with romantic love and the metaphorical modes by which love and romance are imagined in the West. Where the previous exhibition dealt with ‘limit-case’ instances as well as the typical, ‘Love Maps’ dealt more in the serviceably normative.
The exhibition was displayed in two rooms within the EAF gallery. One darkened room had a number of filmed works, projected to wall-size and on continuous rotation. These were meditative and suggested, dreamy, subjective contemplation, or even fretting, and practical, perfunctory dealing with the business of sex and love, as well as with journeying, ideas of life and love as search, yearning, destiny.
To different degrees the films indicated, and gave substantiality to these themes, as mood, thought and action. Although it is possible to describe the films as making propositions of various kinds, they functioned within the exhibition as a source of emotion and gravitas upon which the other half of the show depended and refracted more abstractly. The films were called ‘Isabel’, after the artist’s great grandmother who lived in the Orkneys. Some sequences traced a slow path through a seaside village to (presumably) this woman’s door, focusing on the cobblestones and arriving at the base of the door, retracing actual footsteps—the material conditions, and the social conditions, that would have shaped Isabel’s life. Others showed the wake of